Pentasystem progress

I've been working a bit lately on version 0.6 of the Pentasystem, my roleplaying game system for creating novel-like or movie-like stories in which the heroes change and their lives get complicated as they involve themselves in fighting for what they care about.

It's actually coming together pretty well at last. I've solved a couple of significant issues with the system recently, and it should be in shape to playtest soonish, or at least soonesque.

Hopefully by the time it is, Matt Machell and I will have our browser-based online tabletop emulator up and running and I'll be able to find some people to do a playtest with, despite living in a story-games desert.

Some high points of the system:

• The Coolmap. This is a diagram on which you put what you think will be cool to have in your game. Introducing things that people thought would be cool is rewarded in the game by giving you more resources.
• Characters and situation are meshed together at the beginning, so not only are you driven to conflict by what you care about, what you care about is linked to what the other characters care about.
  
• How many dice you roll is based on how important the attribute you're using is to your character's self-definition.
• You're encouraged to play against type.
• Pain now is rewarded later. Good luck now gets paid for later.
  
• You can sometimes win in a hopeless situation by sacrificing part of who you are or putting something you care about at risk.
• Your attributes can work against you as well as for you.
• You can set up "paths", sequences of events which, when worked through, result in both a reward and a new challenge.
• Changing your character is something you narrate, it's not just adjusting the numbers on a sheet.
• Everyone can play all the time, because supporting characters and sets are run by whoever's standing around.
• Locations are a bit like characters, and get more attributes if they link to more of the themes that everyone said were cool.
• You can tinker with the system yourself using Special Effects, which are rule exceptions that you buy with player points and apply to characters or sets.
• Modelling reality is not important, but modelling fictionality is.

Further bulletins as events warrant.

Character creation comes third

I've started to work out a sequence for starting up a Pentasystem game. So far, it looks like this:

1. Pull out the coolmap and decide what themes on it engage you. Add in others, by all means.
2. Find which entities connect to those themes, and divide up ownership of them among the players.
3. Create main characters and give them motivating attributes that link to the themes and entities.
4. Create supporting characters that are connected to the main characters and that put a face on the entities. Probably do this with an R-map. Make sure you build in some conflict ("family is important to me, I hate heretics, my brother-in-law is a heretic").
   
5. Add motivating attributes to the main characters which connect them to the supporting characters.
6. Create some situations, as gateways, which will act as "inciting incidents" to the main characters you have - features of the world-as-it-is that they can't ignore but will need to try to change, just because of who they are. Make sure, as well, that the things that can bring about change are things the characters are uniquely equipped to do.
   
7. Engaging, conflict-filled gameplay ensues. Or such would be my assumption.

Pentasystem: Player Currency and Character Currency

I finally got around to posting at Story-Games about my idea of the Coolmap,which (in very basic form) looks like this:



Ellipses mean themes, squares mean entities.

The black arrows
are the relationships between the entities (in this case, fantasy
races). The relationships are a kind of entity in their own right;
there are some themes that arise not just from one race or another, but
in the context of the relationship between the races. This is
why there are red arrows coming out of the black arrows. The red arrows
mean "if you have this entity, you potentially have this theme in your
game".

(The three religions, incidentally, should be entities rather than themes.)

The idea is that you glance over the circled themes and
pick ones that appeal. The associated entities will have page numbers, so you can go and
check out only the bits of setting that you're interested in.

Someone in that thread mentioned Verge, which builds a map like this as the start of play (and modifies it in play - indeed, as play).

Which led to this expansion of the idea, which also draws on Shock a bit. At the beginning of a game, you all sit around and talk about what on the coolmap appeals to you, and things you want to add (or delete). Everyone gets two vetoes, which they can use on either people's suggestions of things to add, or on things that are on there already. You don't have to use your vetoes if you don't want to.

You write on any new entities or themes you've agreed on. You then pass the map around the group five times.

At each pass, you may initial any of the entities or themes. This means that you are interested in the entity/theme. You can initial the same one twice (though not more) if you are extra-interested.

After the 5 passes, if any entities are left with only one person's initials, those people get an extra go for each set of initials they have on such an entity. They can put them on any entity, including another one with only one person's initials (not theirs).

Now, "ownership" of the entities is decided by either informal discussion, a bidding system of some kind, or the use of a limited number of chances in much the same way as the above. "Owning" an entity means that you are, basically, the god, spirit, angel or patron saint of that entity - you are its GM. You can declare anything to be true about it (whole group may veto), and if anyone else wants to declare something true about it they need your approval.

Your approval, by the way, should always be given, although you can use "Yes, but", "No, but" or "Yes, and". Again, the whole group may veto, but the owner may not. The closest you have to a veto is the "No, but", which achieves the same thing (you should find out what the person is trying to achieve, of course) by different means, or allows a lesser version which is more in proportion.

If you are the only person with initials on an entity, you can do one of two things. You can automatically own the entity, but you can't create a main character which has it as a motivating attribute; or you can make it a motivating attribute for your main character, but ownership belongs to the group (or to someone else who volunteers to own it).

In general, if you own an entity, your main character can't have it as a motivating attribute.

Entity owners get a "budget" of what were called pentapoints and are now called "fortune". The size of the budget is based on how many initials there are against the entity. With this budget, you get to create supporting characters (and sets and so forth) to interact with the main characters. These are the "faces" on the entity: a priest for a religion, a member of the race for a race, and so on and so forth.

You earn additional fortune for hitting the themes that people initialled, again in proportion to how many people initialled them.

So pentapoints/fortune becomes a player currency; pool points are the character currency. Characters can be improved and helped, as well as created, with fortune - I've yet to work out exactly how this works.

I also need to figure out how you deal with emergent themes or shifting interest. Perhaps you just revise the map at the start of each session.

Underground Railroad: Play Example

I just finished this Underground Railroad play example. (8 pages, pdf.)

This isn't Actual Play; it's Virtual Play, an imaginary scene with imaginary players that gives a feel of what I'm striving for. It's been a very useful exercise, because it's shown me all kinds of weaknesses (and possibly unnecessary complexities) in the rules. The conflict rules are going to have a big revision as a result of it.

I think the most useful thing it gives to someone reading it is a feel for how the cooperative creation of the story happens.

A number of current Story-Games discussions have informed it in one way or another.

Underground Railroad: Earthist Mystics

Earthist mystics, in my Underground Railroad setting, are kind of shamanic. Through various things I've been reading lately I've expanded my idea of how that might go.

My current thoughts are that there are, in these mystics' cosmology, at least three concentric worlds: from inner to outer, the body world, the soul world and the spirit world. Most people can only perceive the body world directly, accessing the other two through it, but the mystics' training gives them the ability to first perceive, then manipulate, and finally enter the soul world, and eventually the spirit world.

The soul world is perceived symbolically and works by relationship and analogy rather than by the rules of the body world. For example, distance in the soul world is not physical distance but relational or emotional distance. Your lover who is a thousand miles away in the body world is right next to you in the soul world. Even relatively inexperienced mystics can perceive these connections between people (though, since the people look nothing like they look in the body, if they don't know both their body and soul appearance they won't be able to connect the two). They can see if you're lying or afraid or angry, as well.

The worlds are closely linked in people, of course - that's more or less a definition of "people" to an Earthist mystic - so healers can see (and advanced healers can manipulate) the health and general state of the body through the soul world. I'm thinking of introducing a famous healer, Soul-Armed <whatever his name ends up being>, who lost part of his left arm in an accident but retained the soul version of it; he can put his missing hand into you and fix your internal organs. (I have in mind a section of famous people to use as both an enrichment of the setting and also, should you wish it, either main characters or supporting characters.)

Perception of the soul world differs between different people, because it's symbolic. However, inexperienced mystics tend to see it rather dimly and in terms of shadows, while experienced mystics see it much more clearly and in terms of light. Who you are looking at also makes a difference: an experienced mystic will seem much sharper and brighter, even to an inexperienced mystic, than an ordinary person.

The small spirits of place, which basically inhabit the spirit world but can descend into the soul world if they want, can meet the mystics there and communicate with them. The relationship with the astronomical gods of the Lunar-Asterists is a matter up for debate. I want to include a mysterious teacher who is synchretizing the two religions and starting to gain a following for what is effectively a new faith. I'm planning to scatter quotes from his philosophy around the book (or maybe it will be someone else's philosophy).

The spirit world is, for humans, uncommunicable and indescribable, since it transcends names and forms; it is a realm of pure being and identity. Mystics believe that by practicing their spiritual disciplines of concentration, renunciation and attention they can come to experience this aspect of reality, though of course they can't say anything about it because words are inapplicable.

When a person's body dies, their soul, no longer anchored in the body world, is drawn towards the spirit world. However, if there is something in the soul world that holds them, they may hang about until it is resolved. If they are very strong or determined, they can cause effects in the body world in pursuit of their resolution. (They're ghosts or unquiet spirits, in other words, and a mystic will generally be called upon to find out what they want so that they can move on.)

Earthist mystics regard elemental magic, which affects primarily the body world, as something of a distraction, and when they study magic it tends to be the soul-oriented kind - communication, domination and the like. However, advanced mystics, who have integrated body, soul and spirit, can often perform soul-body magic like shapeshifting and healing.

Mechanically, I've decided that this kind of thing (magic, psychic powers, superpowers and so forth) all falls under Special Effect: Unusual Powers. I suppose being a lightning calculator, having an eidetic memory or being a contortionist would too. Like any other Special Effect, you buy levels of it, each one more expensive than the last. This is independent of your rating in the related attribute, though. For example, if doing magic was going to be very important to your character's self-definition, but you saw her as a beginning mage, you might buy one level of Special Effect: Unusual Powers but put four or five dice into her Mage attribute. She would be able to reliably light fires or whatever - she'd be very good at it - but she couldn't shoot firebolts.

Pentasystem: conflict

A couple of posts ago I wrote that I wanted Pentasystem conflict to flow back and forth like Dogs conflict. Dogs does this through "sees" and "raises"; you roll all your dice at the beginning, then spend the results a few at a time in each round of the conflict until someone doesn't have enough to continue, or doing so would be too costly. You can get extra dice by "escalating", changing the kind of conflict it is (for example, going from "just talking" to "physical").

The Pentasystem already has the escalation idea (it's called shifting the ground of the conflict, and it increases the seriousness of the consequences of rolling certain numbers on the dice). What about the "sees" and "raises"? It's at least possible that I can achieve a similar feel, using a recycled idea from City of Masks.

In City of Masks, at one point, I had narration going back and forth like this: The challenger (initiating player, in Pentasystem terms) narrated first, then the responding player, then the loser of the conflict, and finally the winner of the conflict. If the responding player was also the loser, this meant three turns, otherwise four. I like this, and I think I'll keep it. (The current City of Masks procedure is that the two take turns narrating, always heading for the outcome already determined, and the winner gets to decide when to stop, so it can go on for as many turns as the winner wants.)

The other thing I'm thinking about at the moment is, who narrates the outcomes and consequences? There's no GM, so the authority that the GM normally has to declare "what happened" is allocated among the players. Currently, the Pentasystem text says this:

The owner of the defeated character, setting element etc. describes the ways in which the defeat brought about change.

I quite like this; it makes defeat more attractive. There are two things to consider, though: outcomes and consequences. Outcomes are what other games refer to as "stakes" (Dogs says "what's at stake"), except that they're more explicitly mechanical; they're the way in which the world or the situation is affected, iin terms of attributes that are created, changed or removed. The above quote refers to the outcomes. There are also the consequences, which are the things that change about the characters. At the beginning of a conflict, the two players agree on alternative outcomes, which are "in question"; as they use attributes and other resources to engage in the conflict, they declare what attributes are being put "at risk", that is, what may change as a result of having engaged in the conflict. I tend to think that regardless of winning or losing the owner of the character, element or whatever should have the say over what specific changes come about as a result of being in the conflict (because you can change by being in a conflict whether you win or lose it; consequences are based on the number of 1s and 6s you roll in the course of the conflict). This is part of what "ownership" means.

Oh, and that highlights a difference from Dogs fallout. In Dogs, you get fallout if you have had to use a lot of dice to win (basically). You get to choose whether you will have fallout from a conflict or not; you can just not push that hard. Everyone does, of course, because that's what makes the game fun, but you don't ever have to. In the Pentasystem, on the other hand, every time you roll dice you risk consequences. They could be good, they could be bad, they could not appear at all, they could appear in numbers as large as the dice, but there's always risk; that's why you have to nominate what you're putting "at risk". Just choosing to have a conflict risks consequences, and you don't get to choose how great they are. But I think you do get to choose exactly what they are; that's only fair.

I need to write this out in a proper flow which will handily double as a play aid. And do that worked example with the sky-cavalry commander and the talking cat.

Pentasystem: Influence

Here's an expansion of something I talked about in my last post. It's strongly inspired by an idea in the version I saw of Tony Dowling's Mathematica (now retitled Principia: Secret Wars of the Renaissance). Tony has a thing - I forget whether it's an ability or a Secret, I think a Secret - called rank (and a parallel thing called wealth) which is about a character's position in society. I was going to call mine Scale, but I've already used that term; I think I'll call it Influence for now.

(Fair warning, by the way: the terminology of the Pentasystem, and the names of a good many things in Underground Railroad, are likely to change. For example, the game Sufficiently Advanced, which is coming out soon, has something called Twists which are completely different from my Twists. I'll probably rename Twists as something like Rollups and Rolldowns - generically, Rerolls, which is what they are. As for UR, the onomastics are totally screwed up and suffer from incipient Bad Fantasy Name Syndrome. I need to sit down and figure out how little work I can do and still create believable languages as background.)

So, Influence. Like everything else, it's rated on a 5-point scale and is an attribute. However, you can specifically have Influence of 0. This happens if you're a peasant, a salaryman, a serf, a rank-and-file, a private soldier, a proletarian or otherwise on the bottom of the food chain. As an individual, you have 0 influence; your voice will not be heard, except maybe, hopefully, by people of influence 1 whom you know.

Influence 1 means you don't have a recognized official leadership position in the prevailing hierarchy, but you have some local influence as a person of good standing - a prosperous peasant, a lawyer, a minister, a valued employee (perhaps a supervisor, but not necessarily) - someone generally who has some wealth and knows how to talk and will know people with influence 2. In the Army, you're an NCO. (OK, that's official leadership; some hierarchies are more official than others.) In the Church, you're a vestryman or something.

Influence 2 means you do have a recognized position at the local level - you're the mayor, line manager or what-have-you. You know people who have influence 1; you are willing, generally, to meet with people of influence 0, though you may dismiss their concerns quite lightly; and you know people of influence 3. You're a lieutenant, maybe a captain, in the Army. In the Church, you're a local priest.

Influence 3 means you have some kind of regional significance inside the hierarchy or are a minor celebrity outside it. You know people of influence 4 (you can kind of see a trend developing here, yes? In general, people know people with one more or one less rank of influence; they are generally willing to talk to people with two ranks less, and can get to see people two ranks higher by special arrangement, usually through a person of the intervening rank). You're a major or a colonel in the Army. In the Church, you're a bishop.

Influence 4, you have national significance; anyone in the country who knows the names of people who are important knows your name. You have direct access to the highest level of influence. You're a cabinet minister, a general, a major celebrity, a captain of industry in the Bill Gates or Richard Branson kind of class, a vice-president if we're talking about a corporation, a Cardinal if we're talking about the Roman Catholic Church. Because, of course, Influence is not just an on-off kind of thing; you may be at the top of one pyramid (Bill Gates, influence 5 if we're talking about Microsoft) but only partway up another, and still further down a third. A general is Influence 4 nationally, but Influence 5 in the Army, where a brigadier is Influence 4.

Influence 5, obviously, is where you don't have a boss, you are the boss. Again, this may be limited to a specific context. It also doesn't mean that you're not accountable to a Board or Cabinet or College of Cardinals or whatever. But the buck stops with you.

On the Board/Cabinet thing, in fact, a general principle of influence is that a group of people who are at the same level has influence one level higher as a group than they do as individuals. So a mob of peasants has Influence 1, a deputation of respectable citizens Influence 2, a regional mayors' conference Influence 3, and so forth.

The mechanical implication of Influence is that you command a certain quantity of resources. I haven't worked out the exact details yet, but my starting point is that you command a certain number of people one level down, who in turn each command a number of people at the next level, and so forth, and their resources are, theoretically, your resources (inasmuch as they fall within the context of the hierarchy in which you have the influence). These levels also insulate you from people more than two levels below you, as a rule, though you may sometimes deign to speak with a peasant if you are a king, or a line worker if you are a CEO. You're unlikely to pay much attention to what they say, though, if you let them say anything at all.

Concretely, if you're a king, you may in theory command the whole country, but in practice in a given situation you may only have a squad of the royal guard with you. I need to work on the whole scaling thing, but that's the principle: the more influence, the more resources, other things being equal.

Also, and this is the important bit, if the main characters can get to you and win a conflict against you, they can get you to use your influence to change things towards the way they want them. You can't change the law of the land by winning a conflict with a peasant, only with the King (or the Royal Council, perhaps). You can get local things done by winning a conflict with an Influence 2 person, regional things with an Influence 3 person, and so forth.

Such, at least, is the principle.

O Hai, I Stoled your Dogs

So I finally bought Dogs in the Vineyard. I'm slowly, slowly moving towards maybe playing it, though having been a late teens/early 20s religious judgemental person I kind of shy away from reenacting that. I mainly bought it for the ideas I could steal be influenced by, and it was not a disappointment in this regard. Not at all.

I took notes as I read through the PDF, and here they are (slightly expanded). Some of them are me paraphrasing Vincent fairly directly, others are my thoughts triggered by things he says. Not all of them, probably, will actually get into the Pentasystem, but I suspect most will.

• If you think the element you plan on introducing could be controversial, ask the group.


• Attribute phrasings:
• A bit of personal history ("I once survived in the woods for 3 days without food or shelter").
• A simple fact: "I'm a survivor."
• A skill: "Survival".
• An attitude or catchphrase: "I can survive anything."
  
  
• Attributes are rated based on how interesting or important they are, not on how "good" they are.
  
  
• Character death (or even character injury) only happens when it is explicitly and voluntarily put in question [in fact this is not strictly speaking the case in Dogs; the dice outcomes can generate a conflict in which the stakes are "your character dies"]. The replacement character gets all the same resources of the old character, plus a bit.
  
  
• Set the scene, say what resources you're using and what you're attempting with them, roll dice, then start narration of actual actions.
  
  
• Possibilities in combat: Turning the opponent's action back (reversing the blow), defending against it (block or dodge), feeling it but going on fighting (taking the blow). Last always has consequences. (Margin of victory in each sub-conflict, I think.)
  
  
• Does the responding player get a response and then an opening themselves? At the moment only if they change the ground do they get to take the initiative. Perhaps they get a response (see) with their bare die roll, but if they bring in other resources (e.g. rerolls) they take initiative (like a raise).
  
  
• Can you hold back successes for follow-up conflicts if you Give in a Pentasystem conflict? I think not.
  
  
• Follow-up conflicts are such if the stakes follow directly from the previous conflict's resolution. They can't have the same stakes unless they have different participants (i.e. not identical participants), AND a different place, AND a different opening ground of conflict.
  
  
• Consequences for the inconsequential: if nobody cares what happens to a supporting character, instead of assigning consequences to that character, give the characters that everyone does care about some equivalent advantage.
  
  
• Relationships (enmeshment): becomes usable in a conflict when the conflict involves the target of the enmeshment as either the opponent (possibly in the form of a representative of that thing, e.g. organization), the setting (if the target is a place or the place represents the target, e.g. a church for the Church) or as what is in question or at risk in the conflict. Cause of the conflict would work as well (I'm in this conflict because of this enmeshment.)
  
  
• In multi-way conflicts, at each turn the person who has initiative gets to say who is affected by their actions, and all those people have to stay in by rolling or bail out by giving up their outcome. Maybe they get to respond in reverse order of the size of the dice they rolled in each round (so anyone rolling a 1 goes before anyone whose smallest die is a 2; if two people roll 1s, look at their next smallest die and so on; in case of ties, go clockwise). 
  
  
• I want to replicate the back-and-forth of sees and raises, but I'm not sure my die mechanic supports it. I've thought about "you cluster your successes that show the same number together, and that's a turn," but I'm not sure how it would work exactly.
  
  
• "A raise is something your opponent can't ignore." 
  
  
• Assisting: Your character has to be clearly capable of helping, it has to clearly be an action that would help, and if anyone objects that it's not reasonable, it doesn't happen.
  
  
• When assisting, you lose the successes you assist with from your own conflict if you are also in a separate part of the conflict.
  
  
• Setting what's in question: I think my as-yet-undocumented idea of "scale" enters in here, rather than Vincent's guidelines "GM should push for small stakes". (Basically, depending on how interested you are in something, more or less powerful characters will turn up to oppose you on that issue; if you beat a powerful character (who, of course, has more resources and so is harder to beat) you can make bigger changes in the world.)
  
  
• Good follow-up conflicts involve stakes which come out interesting either way (of course, but worth repeating).
  
  
• Conflicts which are too large will mean escalation is always the best choice.
  
  
• No hedged outcomes. They're outcomes – things that happen. Nothing should be said, in the set outcomes (what Dogs calls "what's at stake"), about how they happen. That's what the conflict is for.
   
• Conflicts arise because people want things. What do the supporting characters want? 
  
  
• Proto-NPCs or partially generated supporting characters – definitely needed. At least with pool points assigned and some ratings for a few attributes. Then match these with the necessary handles as required.
  
  
• Group-as-character, with an attribute for each person perhaps? This was an early idea I've been moving away from. Perhaps it's time to look at it again.

•  Demonic Influence acts kind of like the momentum of the situation – parallel to 5-act structure determining additional opposition or inertia for unopposed actions?

•  Anything the characters want to do is automatically OK until it conflicts with something another character wants. Then, conflict. (Roll dice or say yes.)

•  Don't keep the secrets, reveal the secrets.

•  Create situation, not plot; people who want things, not supervillains. Create situations where the characters will take sides. Then complicate whichever side they take. (Plot is how characters respond to situation. You can't know that in advance.)

•  Enmeshing with something says you want to be in conflict with (or about) it. Taking an attribute says you want to use that as your means of resolving conflicts.

And a couple of "structuring the book" points:

• Summarize after each major section – quick reference.
  
• Rules index! This is an excellent idea for a game with a lot of rules.

Underground Railroad: Setting Design Principles

I'm starting to come up with some principles for designing the Underground Railroad setting. As I said in the Story-Games RPG Fantasy Setting Wishlist thread (which I am so mining, oh yes I am):

Setting stuff that isn't just "Montanus exports opals and wool and is
dry and cold" but gives you a reason to be a character from Montanus
and tells you what that means in terms of who you are likely to be in
conflict with, what your abilities are likely to be, what you probably
care about...

So every place will have at least one thing about it that makes it a cool place to be from, and one thing which makes it a cool place to set a story or part of a story. Every institution, every setting element generally, should have at least one thing which makes someone say, "I want that in my game." Otherwise, why is it in the setting material? And always, always looking for the potential conflicts. Always.

And subsequent to that, of course, I figured out why you would want to be from Montanus. Because some people from Montanus ride flying horses. Which also fits in to Daniel Solis's request in that thread, in response to several people saying "Airships!": "More flying in general."

Why am I putting so much flying in a setting called Underground Railroad? Because flying is cool, that's why.

Underground Railroad: Cover Inspiration

It is far, far, far too early for me to be thinking about a cover for Underground Railroad (the first Pentasystem setting). However, inspiration strikes when it strikes. Here's what I envisage.

The cover features a young woman, small and slender, like a jockey. Her skin and eyes are brown; what you can see of her hair is black. She is wearing tight-fitting (but not cheesecakey) white leather boots, pants and shirt, and a vest, open at the back, which is covered with white feathers in neat rows. She has a white flying helmet with goggles pushed up, and streaming from the back of it, attached by its middle, a white scarf. A matching white sash is around her waist, where an ice wand is holstered. (I don't know what an ice wand looks like. The artist has to do some work.) She is leading a large white horse with white wings; the horse is grooming its wings with its teeth, because the woman has stopped to argue with (and it's clear from her expression and body language that they are arguing) a small black cat which is up on its hind legs - not in a Peter-Rabbit kind of way, just like an ordinary cat that really wants something from a human.

I'm reasonably sure that her name is Suan; I am sure that she's the commander of the Montanusi sky-cavalry employed as mercenaries by Anavalus IV of Koskant. The cat is a Jorian talking cat called Skyport Midnight, and they are arguing about whether he can have a ride on her flying horse, The Zephyr. I'm strongly considering making this my conflict example in the rules text.


Technorati Tags: Underground Railroad, cover

Current Story-Games Goodness

Some things over on Story-Games that are provoking thought for me at the moment.

1. TonyLB (again), on second-order bribery. Tony's thing is, you set up a Key so that everyone at the table will want to cause things to happen that hit the Key. His example is someone who gets rewarded for defending authority. That means that the other players are going to be questioning authority (because that is bound to get your attention) and the GM is going to be introducing questionable authority (because that is bound to get everyone's attention). Rewarding a specific kind of behaviour that creates a dynamic. I think that's what he means.
2. Tony is also talking about conveying things narratively rather than instructionally, which has inspired me to do some "false document" stuff in my setting for Underground Railroad (I've started a thread to toss out some of my ideas, which so far isn't attracting any posts).
3. He's also discussing his idea of a card-based mechanism for controlling authority which might possibly – possibly – see use in the Pentasystem. Maybe.
4. Sydney Freedberg (in yet another of TonyLB's threads) is talking about setting creation by giving some examples of things that exist and some principles or algorithms that are generally operative that can generate more such elements, and letting it flow from there. It makes sense; if you have a clearly-defined character, you know what your character would do in a given situation even if you've not previously devoted any thought to it. Likewise with setting elements, surely.
5. Finally, Daniel Solis is talking about having actions that typically occur around your character, rather than your character having "powers" as such – for example, a fighter may get ambushed frequently. His ideas (he admits) need further baking, but they lead in intriguing directions. Especially when combined with number 1.

Pentasystem: Filthy Hippy Swine RPG

So here's version 0.5 of the Pentasystem. It's turning into what certain diehard old-school gamers see as the worst kind of anti-D&D.

You get experience based on what your character feels*.

You get rerolls based on your roleplaying*.

Everything your character does uses exactly the same mechanics, with no privilege given to physical combat.

Worst of all, I haven't just "taken power away from the GM". I've killed the GM, taken his stuff, and distributed it among the players, and then set the corpse on fire and danced on the ashes in my hippy sandals.

Truly, I am a swine. If the RPGPundit ever sees this, he'll have a pleonasm. (Which turns out not to mean what I thought it means - something between an embolism and an aneurism - but he'll have one of those, too.)

*Not exactly, but it makes a better story that way.

Pentasystem: Radicalization

The Pentasystem just gets more radical as I go along. I mean that in a couple of senses. Firstly, it started out in very early concept (before it was called Pentasystem) as a generic "adventure" system. "We're adventurers. Our motivation is - adventurosity." Not quite as bad as that, but definitely towards the pulpish end of things.

Of course, Spirit of the Century has this pretty much sewn up, and if you wanted to play the game that was my original concept, SOTC would probably cover it reasonably well. So as the Pentasystem has evolved, it's as if it's searching for an unoccupied (or at least less occupied) evolutionary niche, and is wandering through the possibility space attempting to achieve a comfortable distance from what is already there. Or something. And that seems to be a game of radicalism - challenging the status quo at a basic level. Which is odd, because although I describe myself sometimes as a spiritual descendant of radical Anabaptists, I'm really fairly conservative in my day-to-day life.

Anyway, a couple of threads at Story-Games are currently pushing my "that's intriguing" buttons. Not surprisingly to me, both of them involve TonyLB, who is more or less my muse of gaming for some reason. I just like the way the guy thinks. The questions he asks push light switches in my head.

One of them, started by Tony, is The Power of Class-Based Systems. Pretty nearly everyone chiming in there is saying "classes = good" in the sense of giving you a good start towards a character definition, and this fits with a direction I was already moving in with attributes and derived attributes. Basically, a primary attribute with a whole set of derived attributes is (kind of) a class. It isn't necessarily just a "what do I do" class, though. You can have an attribute Mage which is a "what do I do", but you can have an attribute Dwarf which is "who am I" with a bit of "how do I think", or an attribute Earthist Mystic which is "what do I do", "who am I" and "how do I think" all wrapped up together. In D&D your abilities are defined by class, and your stats are modified by race, while national origin, religion and so forth are largely colour. In TSOY, race and national origin are two independent variables which define what Secrets, etc., you have access to, and your abilities work together to define what you do. In the Pentasystem, it's all attributes, all the way down.

The other thing that's come up in that thread - because Tony is talking specifically about his game Misery Bubblegum, which is all about how other people's opinions of you contribute to your identity (it's a teenage setting) - is that the whole Best Friends chargen thing, where your character's abilities are determined by the other characters' jealousies of you, is another good way to define characters besides class. This is where Enmeshment comes in. It's ultimately based on Best Friends, and gives attributes to other players' characters (and to elements of the setting, and so forth). I need to work more on the "unreliability" of all of this - not only the attributes given to you by others' opinions, but the attributes you give yourself, perhaps. All your attributes are subject to change (unless you lock them); maybe that's enough.

The other thought-provoking thread is one on analyzing GM-less games, which now that I look at it again doesn't have anything in it from Tony at all - but several people reference his game Capes. Ben Lehman says:

There is no inherent need for a GM in a role-playing game. So just write your game, say who does what when, and playtest it. If it isn't fun, or if you see people doing things that are not part of your who does what when, then clearly you need different rules.

And light dawned for me. I'm holding on to a GM-like figure (the Opposition) in my design because, well, you need someone to provide adversity for the other players, right? Because the Czege Principle says you shouldn't provide your own adversity, right? And someone needs to manage all the bits of the setting and situation that nobody else is managing right now, right?

Um - why? Why can't you set it up so that players provide adversity for each other, just as a natural consequence of playing the game (I believe Capes does this really well)? And since the group is collectively defining the world, why do you need to have someone who's in charge of the world? Why not say: "OK, A, you're positively enmeshed with the Lunar-Asterist Church, so you run that aspect of the setting. Define it however you want (but you pay resources for anything that has mechanical effect). You over here, however, B, you're negatively enmeshed with the Lunar-Asterist Church, right? So you are going to adversity the hell out of A, and vice versa, whenever the L-A Church comes up, because that's what's going to reward you. Plus, you get to say that things are true of the Church as well, and if A disagrees, you get to have a conflict over it. Whoever wins - that's how it is." (Actually it may be better to have someone who's not enmeshed either way be the one to run the setting element, which is how the rules currently read.)

Which leaves a lot of detail to fill in, and some questions (like "What happens if there is someone pro but no-one anti?", to which the answer may be "that setting element simply doesn't get fought over"). Plus, it moves it much closer to Shock:, and I wasn't really wanting that, because Shock: seems a bit too abstracted for me. Definitely gives some design challenges. But also, if I can pull it off, marks it out from the pack of slightly-drifted-trad-games, which is where I started out.

Pentasystem: Killing darling #1

I've vaguely suspected for a while that the adage "Kill your darlings" may apply to the Pentasystem's 5x5 grid of arenas vs realms, on which all attributes must be placed. It was part of the system from early on, but it was always a bit arbitrary. Proof of this came just now when I compared, side by side, the grid I came up with out of my setting ideas brainstorm with the original character grid and found several things that were on both, but in different locations. Is communication Emotional/Physical or Mental/Physical? Are prejudices Emotional/Quintessential or Creative/Quintessential? Does it matter, or am I just straitjacketing players by saying, "You can only have a conflict of this type using attributes of this type"?

My conclusion is, it doesn't matter. Ripping this part of the system out will, however, leave a gaping space. I'm not going to rush to fill it. Sooner or later something will turn up which is much better. But it may be difficult to work on other parts of the system now that this fairly central subsystem is cast back into the realm of the undecided.

Pentasystem: Evolution towards revolution

I was, at one point, going to say that the Pentasystem was only innovative from a distance; up close, each individual thing in it has been done before.

That's still sort of true, but the distance at which it's true is changing. As far as I know, the kind of co-evolution of the setting and characters that I'm currently envisaging hasn't been done before (oh - maybe in Verge). It will predispose the game to work well in settings where things are in a state of change, and where there are a number of handles that characters can grasp to attempt to direct that change - which describes Underground Railroad pretty well.

So, I'm thinking that consequences may also apply to setting as well as character. You get into a conflict, and there are things you're trying to change in the setting, but you're risking change to your character as a side effect. But there may be unintended consequences to the setting too...

Also, perhaps consequences are - at least sometimes, maybe at the highest level of escalation - a little bit like Chad Underkoffler's PDQ, where (if I recall correctly, though I can't find it at the moment) getting certain kinds of consequences mean that you then get a complication to your story and have to sort out another issue before you can proceed with your main goal. That would fit with things I've already put in place about how one kind of story can flow into another via subplot or sideplot, and make it into mechanics rather than just advice.

Sydney Freedberg, whose grasp of setting I respect, and Joshua BishopRoby, whose game designing I respect, suggested on Story-Games that instead of doing something highly front-loaded I set up a simple core of things that are important and build from there in the course of play - kind of what I was planning with the characters anyway, with their attributes being elucidated through play. So you take maybe 5 (to pick a familiar number) attributes upfront - most of which will have multiple derived attributes, for richness - and something similar for the setting and situation, and then bring out more depth as you play. All of a sudden it's a lot closer to Risus (quick build on the basis of a few cliches) than it is to GURPS (extended agonizing point-buy).

So what I need now is a mechanic for introducing new attributes to the setting and characters at points where they'll be useful. I'm not talking, here, about the way in which the characters act on the setting to change it (which is a separate problem to solve, and which I have at least a general idea of how to handle); I'm talking about how to introduce new details that have "always already been there" and have only just been mentioned as far as the fiction is concerned, but as far as the game is concerned have just got invented on the spot. There are some reasonably well-explored ways of doing this in the story-games space. The simplest, but to me the least satisfying, is to leave one person playing the whole of "the world" and solely the gatekeeper for what is "real". Then there are point-buys, like Universalis, or vote systems like Verge (last time I looked at Verge, anyway). And then there's the Shock: method of giving parts of the world to each player to administer, which is what I'm currently leaning towards; distributed GMing (like with the Tenan role in Errantry, but not rotating).

I'll probably retain the Opposition player, though, to hold the setting elements and parts of the situation that all the main characters are invested in and to do some of the traditional GM things like provide surprises.

Pentasystem: Setting and Situation Mechanics

What? Setting and situation mechanics?

Yup. This may be a really stupid thing to do; I won't know until I try, of course. It's a development of the idea I had when I read Tony Dowling's Mathematica.

I was trying last week to shoehorn setting elements, like ideas, institutions and "sets" (physical locations), into the same mould as characters: attributes, rated 1-5, set out on a 5x5 grid of the five categories (physical, mental, emotional, creative and quintessential). It wasn't working very well. There are a number of problems with taking something designed for characters and using it for an entirely different purpose. Firstly, the categories don't necessarily match up all that well. And secondly, the 1-5 rating is too restrictive; it implies that an individual character can go up against (for example) a global ideology, attack one of its attributes as if it were just another character, and bring it down.

What I'm groping towards now is keeping the attributes system (which is flexible and intuitive), but allowing the players to collectively rate the attributes of the setting, not by strength, but by how interested they are in engaging with them. This then feeds into the design of the situation. (Kind of a loop back to Situation Engineering from Full Light, Full Steam, which has been an influence in several ways.) The Opposition then gets to assign a budget of points to those elements of the situation which the players want to engage with, and build each one out into characters and objects that they can interact with, notably by having conflicts with them.

Steps towards this for me will include writing down, for each kind of setting element, the sort of attributes it might have, without regard to the 5x5 grid. I may invoke the awesome brainstorming power of Story-Games on that one. So, for example, an ideology can have detractors, defenders, heretics... I'm looking for objects, people and groups, which can then be statted up as opposition. These then become "handles" by which characters can affect the larger setting. It's a revolutionary RPG, is really what it is, which fits nicely with the premise of Underground Railroad.

Unformed as yet is the connection to the various kinds of situation I have already laid out in the text, such as a chase, guarding a valuable item or person, or seeking revenge. I have vague ideas about specifying roles in each such scenario and offering the players the opportunity to fit their characters into them, while the other roles get taken by (representatives of) elements of the setting. Potentially, this is going to be very front-loaded and high-prep, which wasn't necessarily a design goal. However, there's nothing to stop people ignoring a large swathe of the rules in order to play a more pickup kind of version. Some pregens would also be a good idea.

The other thing I need to work out is how the various bits of setting relate to each other. A religion, for instance, can be an idea, an ideology, a worldview, a group and an institution, all at once. Each of those aspects will give it certain attributes. I think this may turn out to be another job for "templates" - after all, if templates give you the derived attributes from being a dwarf, a mage, and a meditator and allow you to combine them together into one character, why not use the same principle? Setting material will then consist of both prose and also template blocks of attributes. (Not stat blocks; there are no numbers involved at this point.)

While I'm babbling on I'll mention the changes I've made since last time. I've put in a quick system summary upfront, based on one of my earlier blog posts. I've talked about the process of characters becoming enmeshed with each other and with the setting and situation (which, obviously, will change when I work out the issues mentioned above). I've written up the beginnings of a secrets mechanic, based on the Story-Games "Secret Mechanics" thread, but that, too, will likely change because finding out secrets about someone or something is an excellent way to get leverage.

I've also put together an early draft of the attributes sheet, which I'm sure will change further. At the moment it should work for characters, groups and important objects; it was going to be for everything, but - see above.

And I found the AutoREALM map that I had made ages back for Underground Railroad, and uploaded it here.

Pentasystem - Underground Railroad

Version 0.4 of the Pentasystem is available, this time adjusted in concert with my Underground Railroad setting. (And here's a link which will always be the current Pentasystem version.)

It was an interesting - and fun - process working on the two side-by-side, and I see why designers generally work on a setting and a system in tandem from the start. As soon as I started to imagine more tangible scenarios, it became clear that there were things missing from the system.

What have I added?

First, implied attributes. These became necessary almost as soon as I started thinking about a Mage character. A Mage (in UR) needs to have a robe, a ring, a staff, several magical skills, two elemental affinities, and a spellbook - that's part of the definition of a Mage. All of those function as attributes. But can you make people spend that many attribute slots just so they can fireball something from time to time?

And then I realized it was a general problem. The example I use in the rules text is a policeman, who has various pieces of equipment (truncheon, handcuffs, maybe a gun, radio...), relationships to lawyers and coroners and private detectives and informants, a badge and probably a uniform (emblems), particular skills... So I came up with the concept of implied attributes. If you have an attribute Mage, you have all the other stuff, and unless otherwise stated it's at the same level as your Mage attribute. (You can pay resources to raise it or get them back by lowering it.)

Secondly, groups. How do you represent a plot to overthrow the government, a political struggle between gangs, a battle between armies? Groups is the answer. Originally, though, I thought of groups because I needed a way to deal with cooperation that allowed multiple mages to work on great projects together - so that you could have cool things like flying horses or permanent teleportation gates that the magic rules didn't quite allow individuals to create, but that would make the setting much more interesting. This fed into the Assistance rules.

I got Consequences straightened out, at least enough to be going on with - I'm sure these rules will change further. At some point, something someone posted at Story-Games alerted me to the fact that there were Consequences in FATE, at which my ears pricked up, I went to the FATE SRD, and - SNARF. (Actually I only pinched the first two levels of Consequences, and adjusted even them.)

Information and Secrets - how do you find out how much you find out? There's more work to do on this, but (stimulated by the question, "How do you decide if you recognize the symbolism of another mage's robe, staff and ring and hence know his level, skills and school?") I put in place some basic rules. It's down to how obscure the information is, given your attributes.

I also wrote up the initial bits of the Personal Scenes section. Personal scenes are where you take a bit of a break from the external action and sort things out in your head, heal up, prepare for future action, work on your issue or goal, or (possibly) refresh your pools. They're the bits in the movie where the music slows down and goes more strings and less brass and percussion and you have two-shots of the hero and heroine discussing What It All Means and possibly Their Relationship. (And, if it's Hollywood, probably getting into bed.)

What about Underground Railroad? Well, most of what I did was work on the magic system, back and forth with the Pentasystem. The magic system got simplified a bit; it was just too baroque for no really good reason. I couldn't think of an easy Pentasystem way to do the "Sometimes the supply of mana in an area isn't as high as at other times", for example, so I dropped it.

I'm not entirely happy with the Healing skill. I still haven't completely worked out the injury and healing rules, and everything is likely to simplify. Perhaps Healing will just become a Special Effect.

I completely rearranged the example spell tables, splitting them up so that there's one table for each skill, with levels down the side and elemental affinities across the top. I think this is easier to refer to than the old layout, with skills down the side, levels across the top (making it necessary to go to landscape format), and differences between elemental affinities crammed into the text. Damn, there's some fun stuff there; I'd forgotten about the Icy Weapon and Fiery Weapon spells, for example. Sometimes you want to address theme, and other times you just have to set something on fire. UR caters for both.

A note on the name: It's a double reference, firstly to the dwarvish system of (literal) underground railroads in the setting, but secondly to the network which helped slaves escape before the American Civil War. I'm thinking of a similar network which helps gnomes escape their dwarf oppressors. Need to put that in the text.

(There's no reference intended to the RPG term "railroad", meaning "the GM has made up the plot beforehand and will force you to stick to it." In fact, the Pentasystem, played as written, specifically does not support this. There is even a bolded statement that "the Opposition should not prepare".)

Next steps, I think, will include making some of the play aids that I have blithely referenced in the text, now that the rules are detailed enough that I can figure out what they should look like. This will include the character sheet, the group character sheet, the consequences sheet, the magic item sheet and a few others. I'm concerned that it might seem like a bit too much bookkeeping; on the other hand, the actual system is relatively simple and has few exceptions. The play aids are really to help you apply the same system in a number of different ways.

I'd like to work out a few example templates, too, not just for mages but for Earthist shamans, and Lunar-Asterist priests, and dwarvish merchants, and dwarvish craftspeople, and gnome mecha pilots, and a few others. Also some Special Effects. This is likely to have the effect of making the rules still more concrete.

And then I'd like to do it again, with a non-magical setting that so far I haven't come up with. Pirates, ninjas, pulp, it's all been done, and done well. There's a more-or-less generic space opera game based on FATE coming out, apparently, though I may just say "To hell with it" and do one anyway, or maybe a transhuman or cyberpunk game.

I do have an idea for a setting which is a ringworld, with a sophisticated space-facing civilization on the outer side dealing with the universe at large, while a naive pastoral society lives on the inside, growing their food in exchange for minor tech, and kept deliberately unaware of the greater scheme of things. Apart from what they each know, the economic thing is a bit like the dwarves and the humans in UR, but that may not be too much overlap. I don't have a name for it just yet.

Pentasystem: Capsule Summary

Let's see how compactly I can summarize the Pentasystem. It's useful to pull back from the detail and boil it down like this. I may occasionally contradict yesterday's draft slightly here; it's still in process. Some of the terminology is likely to change, too.

The basis of the Pentasystem is the five categories: Physical, Mental, Emotional, Creative and Quintessential (which has to do with identity). There are five pools, five arenas, five realms, and five grounds of conflict, all with the same names.

The pools work like TSOY pools, and the arenas and the grounds of conflict are closely linked to them. The realms are slightly different; they represent, respectively, things, knowledge, relationships, skills and characteristics. All attributes of characters, situations and setting elements are placed on a grid of arenas vs realms - for example, the physical arena/emotional realm intersection represents blood relationships, and the quintessential arena/physical realm intersection is emblematic gear, like a policeman's badge (or a Dog's coat).

Depending whether you are going for characters who are average or above average for their setting, everyone gets a character rating between 15 and 20. Each player distributes this many points among the five categories (minimum 1, maximum 5 for each), and creates attributes (wherever they like on the grid) which total to this many dice.

The number of points in a category determines:

• the starting level of the pool;
  
• the success number on the dice rolled in an area (6-sided die, roll equal or less, so 1 is always a success and 6 is never a success);
• the default number of dice to roll if you have no attribute to use in a realm.

Attributes are like Dogs traits or FATE aspects, except that they also take in skills, gear and so forth. They can have "twists", which come in two types. An "uptwist" is an advantageous side of the attribute, and gives rerolls on failures; a "downtwist" is a disadvantageous side to the attribute, and forces rerolls of successes. Using an uptwist costs pool points, using a downtwist refreshes pool points (this was inspired by Thematic Batteries in Full Light, Full Steam).

In a conflict, as with Dogs escalation you can bring in further resources by shifting the ground of conflict (five grounds, remember, same as the five categories). Each time you do this, the consequences increase. I haven't fully worked out how, but basically you end up with more or stronger twists and potentially more attributes, affecting the attributes you declare "at risk" in the conflict.

These are distinct from the attributes - of characters, situation or setting - which are "in question" in the conflict. These are directly affected - strengthened, weakened, changed, protected, destroyed - by the winner's margin of success in the conflict (winner's successes minus loser's successes, or just winner's successes less an "inertia" figure for unopposed rolls - haven't figured out yet how inertia works).

If an attribute is central to your character's self-definition, you can "lock" it, meaning that it will always be true, unaffected by consequences, and can't be put in question. Unlocking it, however, releases more power, as well as being narratively interesting and serving as a "hit me here now" flag.

Special Effects (like TSOY Secrets or FATE stunts) do unusual narrative and mechanical things, and basically give you an API to tinker with the standard way the system works.

You buy additional Special Effects, influence on the setting and other goodies using pentapoints (like TSOY XP or FATE points), which are earned when attributes turn up in the fiction which you have declared some of your own attributes to be "enmeshed" with. This is also inspired by FLFS, this time the Situation Engineering rules (in turn inspired by Dogs town creation), as well as by TSOY Keys. Basically the idea is that you set yourself up to earn points by coming up with ways that your character is engaged with the other characters, the setting and the situation - which should produce gameplay that everyone is invested in, especially since setting and situation creation is a group activity.

I think that's basically it.

Oh, and further to yesterday's post - I decided I'm going to go for the fantasy-steampunk setting. I mean, the way I've set it up, it not only has dwarves, gnomes, elves, steampunk, mecha, zeppelins and magic, it also has theme: gender roles, racism, forbidden love, rebellion, industrialization and its discontents, generational conflict, postcolonialism (the elves, as former imperial masters), a nascent empire, haves and have-nots both economic and magical, rivalry among the several philosophical approaches to magic (specifically designed as an analogy for the open source/closed source debate in software development)...

Steam. Theme. Mechanical reinforcement for caring about the setting, situation, and other people's characters. Mechanical reinforcement for taking a beating now so that you can be unstoppable later. Sounds like a storygame to me.

EDIT: new version 0.3 completed, merged with the Acts of Increasing Desperation material (so there's now plot-level advice as well as character-level mechanics, and it's 33 pages long).

Pentasystem v0.2

So here's the Pentasystem version 0.2 (14-page PDF).

It's a lot closer to an actual system now, though there are still gaps. I still haven't quite figured out the escalation of consequences, and there are obvious holes like "How do I do an unopposed action?" and the like. I also need to blend it with the Acts of Increasing Desperation text or much thereof, and build some templates, character sheets and the like. And piles and piles of examples.

I think there may be a mechanic whereby a minor character (or organization, or other character-like thing) can start out as an attribute, or even part of an attribute, and gradually become a fully-fledged character with their own motivations and desires. That could be fun.

The big thing that's missing is any kind of setting. It's designed for setting-neutrality, but some kind of default setting is needed. Problem is, I'm not sure what. I could use my Underground Railroad setting (fantasy steampunk: Dwarves in trains, exploiting gnomes in mecha; elves in zeppelins; camel-centaurs...), but I have a sneaking suspicion that while it would probably be tremendous fun to play, it may turn people off to have Yet Another Elf Opera Setting. I've been browsing the "settings we want" threads on Story-Games, but frankly, very little of it appeals to me. A lot of it is dark, for a start. If dark horror despairing post-apocalyptic dystopian tragic total party kill is the North Pole, I'm sitting approximately in Auckland, New Zealand (metaphorically as well as literally) - about 2/3 of the way to the opposite pole. And much of the stuff that isn't dark is historical, which sounds like work. I need to find either something that everyone loves that's never been done well (cyberpunk might be a candidate), or come up with something completely creative along the lines of City of Masks.

It would be good to have at least two example settings, a magical one and a non-magical one.

Oy, there's a lot of work to get this thing finished, and I don't know if anyone will even be interested in it. Which is what encourages me to work primarily on the fun bits.

Designing in public: the Pentasystem

Inspired by a Story-Games thread on designing in public, here I am.

The other day I came up with a (still extremely sketchy) character-level game system I'm currently calling the Pentasystem, because the number 5 crops up in it a bit. It will do so more if and when I integrate it with my plot-level system, currently called Acts of Increasing Desperation. This is - I think - all a part of my Modular Game System.

The Pentasystem is kind of inspired by the Big Three Indie Systems, namely:

• the Dogs system (as far as I know this doesn't have a more generic name, but it's now used in The Princes' Kingdom and Afraid as well as Dogs in the Vineyard);
• the Solar System (basis for Clinton Nixon's The Shadow of Yesterday, but under an open license and hence widely used for other games, including my own Errantry and Tony Dowler's Mathematica);
• FATE (basis for Spirit of the Century and the forthcoming Dresden Files RPG, but again, widely used as a basis for "homebrews" because of an open license).

The Dogs part of the inspiration is the smallest, partly because I don't own any of the games which use it and only know what I know about the system by indirect methods. But the key Dogs idea I want to seize on - not really reflected in the current draft - is that anything, from "Girls make me feel funny" to "My rifle" to "My relationship with Sister Abigail", is mechanically represented in the same way: a certain number of dice, which can change in the course of the game. (This is what I'm currently calling "Attributes".) Also, the concept of "escalation", that when you change how you're dealing with a situation that opens up the possibility of bringing new factors to bear. And finally, "fallout" - having a conflict will change you (though my implementation will be different; I don't know what it will be, but it will be different).

Because I've done a Solar System game (Errantry), its influence is the clearest. I like the idea of "pools", though I'm planning five of them (the current draft of the Pentasystem says 3, but it will be 5, as per AoID). I think these will also be used as the escalation elements as per Dogs.

Pools power and fund your unusual actions. At the moment, my plan is that the base level (not the current level, but the base level) of your pool determines your success number on the dice for anything connected to that pool.

Keys are commonly mentioned as the best bit of the SS. They're the things which drive you - unrequited love, a desire for glory or whatever - and you get rewarded when they turn up in the fiction, in such a way that your character can only change if the Keys turn up regularly. The Pentasystem draft doesn't have them yet, but AoID does (in the form of goals and dilemmas). I want to do more work on this, it's at a very early stage as yet. I'm not entirely sure that they won't be dealt with, mechanically, as Attributes just the same as everything else, maybe tied to the Will pool.

A bit like Keys are Aspects in FATE. The cool thing about Aspects, though, is that you not only get rewarded for playing them, but you can also not play them in a given situation, if you're willing to pay out a resource. Also, anyone can invoke anyone else's Aspect - point to it and push it, basically. That's going in.

Secrets in SS, or Stunts in FATE, are ways to do unusual things. They have a resource cost. At the moment, AoID has "Special Effects" which are equivalent. I'd like this to be more integrated with the other mechanics, but that's a want, not a design goal.

A couple of things have come from outside the Big Three. One is the "corruption"-type mechanic of dice turning into their opposites, attributes or relationships becoming "problematic", etc. This is more-or-less a storygames commonplace, probably coming originally from Sorceror's Humanity. The other is the idea of a "pool" of opposition dice, which I'm currently calling "risk dice"; one of the espionage games, I forget which, has something like this. However, I'm making some available to the protagonists as well as to the Opposition player, so that they also can give attributes to the environment.

Oh - the GM role is spread around like butter. This is my normal approach and is partly cultural. It's just assumed in NZ these days that there should be a rotating chair for most regular meetings and that other roles similarly rotate around the participants, even if someone present is, hierarchically, the "boss".

Finally, what I'm doing deliberately different from the Big Three is using only 6-sided dice. They're more familiar to people who haven't previously gamed, and they're certainly easier to get hold of. If you go into most cheap-crap-from-China shops, of which there are a plethora, you can pick up anything up to 12 D6s for $2. That same $2 will buy you one polyhedral die from the one shop I've found in Auckland - largest city in the country - that stocks them. The picture in the US is very different, of course, but I'm not there.

FATE and the Solar System are Fudge-descended and use Fudge dice, which even many long-time gamers dislike (and which you have to add and subtract every time). Dogs uses masses of assorted polyhedrals. The Pentasystem uses, at base, five D6s at a time - though you will need more dice than that, and in a couple of colours. You just count successes, which are rolls under a certain number, set by your pool. Ones are always successes (and do other good things), sixes are always failures (and do other bad things). There are no modifiers to add or subtract.

There's a very long way to go from this sketchy thing to any kind of finished game, but it's a start.

Take of these elements all that is fusible,
Melt them all down in a pipkin or crucible...